Published 4:00 am, Thursday, May 22, 2003

Photo: ROBERTO SCHMIDT

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Paul , Iraq's civilian administrator, speaks during a news conference while touring the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, Sunday May 18, 2003. Touring the country he has been entrusted to reconstruct, the top American civilian official met Sunday with a city council billed as postwar Iraq's first elected body and called it a ``great example of embryonic democracy.'' (AP Photo / Roberto Schmidt, pool) less

Paul , Iraq's civilian administrator, speaks during a news conference while touring the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, Sunday May 18, 2003. Touring the country he has been entrusted to reconstruct, the top ... more

2003-05-22 04:00:00 PDT Baghdad -- L. Paul Bremer, the chief U.S. civilian in Iraq, said Wednesday that selection of an interim Iraqi government is at least seven weeks away, prompting aspiring leaders from Kurdish and returned exile groups to warn that Iraqis are tiring of the 6-week-old U.S. occupation and want swift movement toward self-rule.

The foreign ministers of France, Russia and Germany, meanwhile, said they would support a U.N. Security Council resolution lifting more than a decade of international sanctions on Iraq, clearing the way for approval of the measure and providing the Bush administration a major diplomatic victory.

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The resolution, which could be voted on as early as today, would also give the United States control over all Iraqi assets until "an internationally recognized, representative government" is in place.

The new time line laid down by Bremer calls for an Iraqi national convention in mid-July to pick an interim government that would have limited functions under U.S. tutelage until elections could be organized. That is weeks later than American officials had once predicted. The interim government's responsibilities are still the subject of disagreement between U. S. officials and their increasingly dissatisfied Iraqi allies.

The delay appeared to be the result of enduring security problems in parts of Iraq, most notably in Baghdad -- the capital city, with 5 million people -- and a lingering sense among U.S. officials that the process to choose even a temporary postwar government had not been sufficiently inclusive.

Bremer has moved quickly since arriving last week to replace Jay Garner as the chief civilian in U.S.-occupied Iraq, seeking to give the U.S. mission a more aggressive, directed posture. Bremer has made resurrecting the police force, adding troops and protecting the new government from Baath Party influence top priorities after Garner watched the security situation worsen for weeks with little response.

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Since Saddam Hussein's government collapsed, the U.S. occupation had worked primarily through seven organizations representing Kurds, Shiites, returned exiles and traditional democrats, anointing them an administration in waiting. Since Bremer's takeover, however, U.S. officials have sought to include additional ethnic groups, tribal leaders and professional associations to ensure that any interim government has legitimacy across a diverse population of 24 million people that has never known self-rule.

"The group is not representative of all Iraqi people, by its own admission, " Bremer said Wednesday at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a renovated prisoner holding center. "There's some work for us to be done to identify a truly representative group."

Establishing a new government has become the broadest political task facing U.S. officials in Iraq since a successful war has given way to a complicated peace. At the same time, they are trying to restore basic civil administration and security.

U.S. officials announced that they will begin paying the country's 1.4 million civil servants Saturday for the first time since the collapse of Hussein's government. Bremer said the first payroll comes to $45 million and will be paid in Iraqi dinars and dollars. He said the money was coming from a $1.7 billion pool of Iraqi government assets frozen in U.S. banks since the Persian Gulf War.

David Nummy, the senior U.S. Treasury Department official in Iraq, said half the civil servants will receive raises under the new system. Teachers will see their pay rise from roughly $20 a month to $100 a month. Police salaries will double to $100 a month. Iraq's military and intelligence service employees, who tended to be the highest paid of the lot, will not receive salaries in this round.

On May 5, Garner said the "nucleus" of an interim government would be in place by the end of the month, raising hopes among many Iraqis for a quick U.S.

occupation. But Bremer revisited the time line in light of the difficulties U. S. officials have had securing Baghdad and winning consensus among parties.

Friday, in his first meeting with the Kurdish, exile and Shiite leaders, Bremer told them that the interim government was still weeks away and that it would be far more modest than many had hoped. Bremer and his British counterpart, John Sawers, made it known that they favored an interim "authority" with partial responsibility over such minor ministries as health, education and agriculture.

The authority would also be responsible for supervising the writing of a new Iraqi constitution and overseeing judicial reform. But it would remain for more than a year without real policy-making ability or running major ministries like, finance, interior and the security services.

Hoshyar Zibari, a spokesman for the Kurdistan Democratic Party, said the resolution "changed the mission from liberation to occupation" and that even ordinary Iraqis would see the interim authority as "silly and subservient" to the United States.